Cross Keys, Virginia
February 1831
Nat Turner stroked the horse’s mane before placing the bit in its mouth. When the horse was bridled and hitched and the wagon was readied, Nat Turner helped Sallie Francis Moore Travis aboard. She was on her way to a Valentine’s Day party at the Whiteheads’.
They traveled down the road with no name and past Giles Reese’s farm, where Cherry lived now. Anxiously, she prattled behind him, speaking more to herself than to him.
At night sometimes he dreamed of rescuing his wife and son. He dreamed of his hands wrapped around Giles Reese’s throat.
If any man had touched his wife, Reese would have gone insane. Other white men would have thought Reese justified for shooting someone who tried to steal his wife. They would have joined Reese in gutting the thief, hanging him, castrating him, and worse. So sometimes at night Nat Turner dreamed the same dreams and woke with broken straw gripped tight in his fists.
He looked toward the Giles Reese farm and would not allow himself to turn away. He made himself feel it—the shame, the rage, the anger, the betrayal—so he would be one with every other man who suffered, every black man who for generations had had his wife, his family stolen away. He would not allow himself to hide from the suffering. In the past, he had been carving peace for himself by not feeling, but now he opened his heart and mind to it. He forced himself to feel it now and to remember.